Is Windows XP secure?

Eduardo Ponce de Leon | 2016-05-27

Why we should stop using Windows XP even if we love it so much,

Today I got a client asking me to set up an email on her computer, and she asked me a bunch of security questions that seemed somehow too advanced for a regular user, which let me to deduce that she was being couched elsewhere. One of the questions was why our server was not secured? That is very big word that can mean many things.

Not secured? What do you mean? I asked.

She told me that her other tech guy told her that our server was not secure because we didin't have a proper SSL certificate installed, which is completely false, but to my surprise her computer in fact was giving her a security warning on our website which brought me to do some research.

As I was installing her email on Outlook one of the solutions that I offered her to check her emails besides using Outlook was through webmail on our server, which obviously we have it secured with an SSL certificate and it always redirects the user to https by default, but her browser (Chrome) was always giving her the following error:

This site can’t provide a secure connection

www.multimediaxp.com uses an unsupported protocol.

ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

It turns out that she is using Windows XP and she has been having a lot of security issues, or mostly warnings. From the operating system, antivirus software and mostly from the browser. Which made her thing that many things online are not secure, including our server.

What happens is that Windows XP is dead for Microsoft, they are not sending any more security updates or any kind of updates actually, by not having new updates many other software companies decided not to create updates as well for users on Windows XP. Chrome is one of them and starting April 2016, Chrome will continue to function on these platforms but will no longer receive updates and security fixes.

We secure our sites using an SSL offered by a security proxy company called CloudFlare, very popular and used by millions around the world, I am guessing that the certificate that we have has a new protocol not installed in Chrome for Windows XP users, which leads to the error mentioned above.

So for all those Windows XP lovers, it’s time to move on you are heading towards an insecure digital world and no one can help, Windows will not issue security updates and other software creators either. I suggest moving to Windows 7 or 10 ASAP.